Cause I'm a sucker for your lucky, pretty eyes
My favorite Liz Phair record is whitechocolatespaceegg. This might be filed under the maxim that one tends to most prefer the first album you hear by a given artist (this works better if said artist is really good, of course). I bought the album because "Polyester Bride" was on the radio in 1998, and I loved it, and that used to be a way that I bought albums: hearing a song on the radio and loving it. But apart from any 1998 nostalgia or even a great single (and indie credibility be damned, I don't really see another viable candidate for best single she's ever released), whitechocolatespacegg is a great record, smart and rueful, catchy but not sing-songy, sometimes heartbreaking in Phair's inimitably direct style.
For awhile, I was convinced it would be like Pinkerton for girls: a record that didn't sell all that well when it came out, but eventually would hit 500,000 copies based primarily on the fact that the people who did buy it loved it and got other people to (eventually) buy it, growing its reputation over the years.
This didn't really happen; in fact, you can find plenty of people eager to conform to the peaked-way-early narrative that says Phair made her masterpiece, Exile in Guyville, early on and spent the rest of her years trying to live up to it. But I also prefer Exile's follow-up, Whip-Smart. For me, Whip-Smart and whitechocolatespaceegg, divorced from the new-feminism hype and limited production and vague/supposed Rolling Stones connections, better showcase Phair's voice -- as a writer considering her relationships and new motherhood and imagining weird characters, and her literal voice, sometimes scraping some low notes on Whip-Smart, then clear and oddly pretty on spaceegg.
But those records, which I recommend to just about any human being around as they are readily available for a couple bucks on half.com or any number of record store used racks, get overshadowed by what came later: the super-production sell-out opus Liz Phair, employing the Matrix (known at the time as Team Avril; not really sure what they've been up to recently, actually) on four cornerstone tracks, including a sorta-hit I sorta-liked called "Why Can't I" (you may remember it from some movie trailers in the summer of 2003?) and a couple of fucking awful songs like "Extraordinary" and "Rock Me."
What's most striking about Liz Phair in retrospect is how patched-together it is: you've got the four Matrix-y singles; you've got some songs she recorded with Chris Penn (Aimee Mann's husband!) sort of in the vein of whitechocolatespaceegg; and there's some MOR stuff somewhere between. The possibly less-liked Somebody's Miracle is actually a more cohesive attempt to solidify the poppier sound she introduced on whitechocolatespaceegg; it's nowhere near as good as that record, but it's also leagues more listenable straight through than Liz Phair. In fact -- and I'm sure I've said this about Weezer in the past, too, and had plenty of people not believe me -- if you took the best songs from those two records and made a ten-track album, it would be a really good one. Much poppier than Exile, yes, but totally worthwhile: Take "Red Light Fever," "Take a Look," "Little Digger," "Firewalker," "Leap of Innocence," "Wind and the Mountain," "Somebody's Miracle," "Got My Own Thing," "Table for One," and, I don't know, maybe a less overproduced version of "Why Can't I." These are good-to-great songs. Collectively, I've probably listened to the as much as any number of actual albums that I really like.
That hypothetical ten-track hybrid album would've still been dismissed, of course, and probably much more quietly, and without the just-barely hit that I'm fairly certain made it onto a NOW! compilation (even if the song was retained, my alternate-universe version wouldn't involve a major promo push). But it seems like that superficial success and greater attention -- and with it, a lot of bile -- may have done Phair more harm than good, at least judging from the weirdest, most intentionally irritating songs off of Funstyle, her new album and first in five years, the longest break since the gulf between spaceegg and Liz Phair.
Rather than trying faux-provocative pop updates of her actually-provocative Exile songs a la "HWC," the provocations on Funstyle, which came out over the holiday weekend with no prior announcement, available as a six-dollar download directly from Phair's website, are more of the "I know you hate it" variety. It's the kind of pre-emptive sorta-self-satire that has to be really, really funny and smart to not sound defensive. I love Liz Phair and, really, think the world of her as a songwriter and singer, but let's just say: it sounds defensive. The immediate, reasonable reaction would be: no no no no stop stop stop you're making it worse oh fuck!!!
Because of this, I originally thought about writing about Phair in comparison with M. Night Shyamalan: both of them got a lot of good press early in their careers and both seem stuck in a downward spiral, trying different stuff but unable to make any of it work. Phair has Exile, Whip-Smart, and spaceegg; Shyamalan has The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs (that is to say, two follow-ups that I like at least as much as the original breakthrough, but a lot of people don't). In both cases, it's been awhile since I've loved something they've made, and that's disappointing. Every time either of them puts out a record or a movie I still tend to think: well, this time, he/she could pull it off. Neither has ever released anything so bereft of talent that I would assume that they'll never make something worthwhile again (although: I still haven't seen Airbender after the 3-D cock-up. I bet it's great-looking, though, even if everything else about it sucks). They've both been releasing stuff that tends to (at least for some critics and fans) make their previous critically-reviled release look much better in comparison.
But maybe the Shyamalan career doesn't work as well as a reference point for me, because the last three Liz albums are more like variations on The Village: lots of good stuff that only makes the bad stuff all the more frustrating (this is also true, to some degree, of Lady in the Water and The Happening, but those movies aren't nearly as well-made as The Village). There are certainly moments on Funstyle that rival the worst stuff off of the self-titled album, and I can understand the argument that failing at MIA-style sample-laden skit-noise-rap is in many ways worse than semi-succeeding at Avril Lavigne-style mall pop (however: I hate the song "Extraordinary" so, so much, as much as I hate some of the Weezer songs from Make Believe).
But the other songs on the record, if not top-tier Liz, aren't so far removed from her other work. The "normal" songs on Funstyle are mostly pitched somewhere between whitechocolatespaceegg and Somebody's Miracle in terms of melody, production, and lyrical content. Nothing is as bracing or catchy as "Polyester Bride" or "Jealousy" or "Never Said" or "What Makes You Happy" or, for that matter, as lovely as "Table for One," but she sings about new loves and looks at cracks in relationships, and some of it is quite affecting. As several writers have already pointed out, if Phair had put out a surprise EP consisting of "You Should Know Me," "Miss September," "Oh, Bangledash," "And He Slayed Her," and "Satisfied," it would generate a much more muted reaction, at least some of which would probably be: Liz is back, sort of!
Of course, not nearly as much has been written about those songs on the whole. This time around, criticism seems to be a self-selecting process: many of the bloggy reactions to Funstyle have actually been quite thoughtful and considered, far moreso than many of the reactions to Liz Phair and Somebody's Miracle (even in retrospect). I particular liked the Ann Powers blog post and a refreshingly non-outraged discussion on The Awl.
Of course, there are plenty of less nuanced opinions, too. Most of the WTF-snarking has come from people who listened to the stream of "Bollywood" and posted something immediately to be first, as if the album hadn't actually been released yet. A lot of major outlets still haven't bothered to review the record in full, presumably because music writers like getting their advance review copies, and why bother paying six bucks to download a messy, erratic Liz Phair album when you can stream the first single and just laugh at it? (And for the record: "Bollywood," with its silly raps and cartoony vocal effects, is a damn sight better than "U Hate It," which closes out the record.)
And Funstyle is messy and erratic, all the more so for, like Liz Phair, mingling some of her worst songs ever in with a bunch of more measured tunes with an eclecticism that borders on masochism. But for now, I've found the record compulsively listenable, as if I can listen to it enough to finally understand what Liz is thinking with some of these songs. Not her literal intent, which is painfully clear on the worst of the skit-like bedroom experiments, but why she thought these dopey songs belonged on a record with a half-batch of traditional Liz songs. I wonder if this is a singer-songwriter problem; Ben Folds has experienced similar problems in recent years, reconciling some wonderfully perceptive and well-written songs with clumsy satire.
My final reaction to this phase will have more to do with what Liz wants to do with Funstyle. If this is a one-off released for fun, Liz blowing off steam and collecting what she's been working on lately, well, it doesn't entirely work, but I don't mind paying six bucks for the decent stuff, especially when that money goes directly to her. But if this is all we hear from her for the next three to five years -- the website claims that tour dates are coming; how can she tour on this album, really?! -- then it's a bit more troubling. Not so much for the existence of jokey tracks, but for the scraped-together nature of mixing jokey tracks with what sound like fairly polished demos. I could write a whole other post speculating about what all of this belated music-industry-bashing is about, since last I heard she was signed to the indie ATO records, and I can't imagine she was getting a lot of pressure to tart it up from them -- yet the (I assume) sarcastic mock acceptance speech in "U Hate It" mentions Dave Matthews, one of the ATO founders (and whatever I think of Dave Matthews music, the dude seems to have pretty decent taste in other music, and regardless, I can't imagine he makes for a particularly malevolent label exec). Funstyle makes me worried not because Liz Phair is over, but because I'm afraid she may see this as her last resort -- the best she can do in a collapsing industry. At this point, I'm hoping her next record gets no attention, not to sabotage her career, but to remove her gifts from this weird, vicious cycle.
For awhile, I was convinced it would be like Pinkerton for girls: a record that didn't sell all that well when it came out, but eventually would hit 500,000 copies based primarily on the fact that the people who did buy it loved it and got other people to (eventually) buy it, growing its reputation over the years.
This didn't really happen; in fact, you can find plenty of people eager to conform to the peaked-way-early narrative that says Phair made her masterpiece, Exile in Guyville, early on and spent the rest of her years trying to live up to it. But I also prefer Exile's follow-up, Whip-Smart. For me, Whip-Smart and whitechocolatespaceegg, divorced from the new-feminism hype and limited production and vague/supposed Rolling Stones connections, better showcase Phair's voice -- as a writer considering her relationships and new motherhood and imagining weird characters, and her literal voice, sometimes scraping some low notes on Whip-Smart, then clear and oddly pretty on spaceegg.
But those records, which I recommend to just about any human being around as they are readily available for a couple bucks on half.com or any number of record store used racks, get overshadowed by what came later: the super-production sell-out opus Liz Phair, employing the Matrix (known at the time as Team Avril; not really sure what they've been up to recently, actually) on four cornerstone tracks, including a sorta-hit I sorta-liked called "Why Can't I" (you may remember it from some movie trailers in the summer of 2003?) and a couple of fucking awful songs like "Extraordinary" and "Rock Me."
What's most striking about Liz Phair in retrospect is how patched-together it is: you've got the four Matrix-y singles; you've got some songs she recorded with Chris Penn (Aimee Mann's husband!) sort of in the vein of whitechocolatespaceegg; and there's some MOR stuff somewhere between. The possibly less-liked Somebody's Miracle is actually a more cohesive attempt to solidify the poppier sound she introduced on whitechocolatespaceegg; it's nowhere near as good as that record, but it's also leagues more listenable straight through than Liz Phair. In fact -- and I'm sure I've said this about Weezer in the past, too, and had plenty of people not believe me -- if you took the best songs from those two records and made a ten-track album, it would be a really good one. Much poppier than Exile, yes, but totally worthwhile: Take "Red Light Fever," "Take a Look," "Little Digger," "Firewalker," "Leap of Innocence," "Wind and the Mountain," "Somebody's Miracle," "Got My Own Thing," "Table for One," and, I don't know, maybe a less overproduced version of "Why Can't I." These are good-to-great songs. Collectively, I've probably listened to the as much as any number of actual albums that I really like.
That hypothetical ten-track hybrid album would've still been dismissed, of course, and probably much more quietly, and without the just-barely hit that I'm fairly certain made it onto a NOW! compilation (even if the song was retained, my alternate-universe version wouldn't involve a major promo push). But it seems like that superficial success and greater attention -- and with it, a lot of bile -- may have done Phair more harm than good, at least judging from the weirdest, most intentionally irritating songs off of Funstyle, her new album and first in five years, the longest break since the gulf between spaceegg and Liz Phair.
Rather than trying faux-provocative pop updates of her actually-provocative Exile songs a la "HWC," the provocations on Funstyle, which came out over the holiday weekend with no prior announcement, available as a six-dollar download directly from Phair's website, are more of the "I know you hate it" variety. It's the kind of pre-emptive sorta-self-satire that has to be really, really funny and smart to not sound defensive. I love Liz Phair and, really, think the world of her as a songwriter and singer, but let's just say: it sounds defensive. The immediate, reasonable reaction would be: no no no no stop stop stop you're making it worse oh fuck!!!
Because of this, I originally thought about writing about Phair in comparison with M. Night Shyamalan: both of them got a lot of good press early in their careers and both seem stuck in a downward spiral, trying different stuff but unable to make any of it work. Phair has Exile, Whip-Smart, and spaceegg; Shyamalan has The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs (that is to say, two follow-ups that I like at least as much as the original breakthrough, but a lot of people don't). In both cases, it's been awhile since I've loved something they've made, and that's disappointing. Every time either of them puts out a record or a movie I still tend to think: well, this time, he/she could pull it off. Neither has ever released anything so bereft of talent that I would assume that they'll never make something worthwhile again (although: I still haven't seen Airbender after the 3-D cock-up. I bet it's great-looking, though, even if everything else about it sucks). They've both been releasing stuff that tends to (at least for some critics and fans) make their previous critically-reviled release look much better in comparison.
But maybe the Shyamalan career doesn't work as well as a reference point for me, because the last three Liz albums are more like variations on The Village: lots of good stuff that only makes the bad stuff all the more frustrating (this is also true, to some degree, of Lady in the Water and The Happening, but those movies aren't nearly as well-made as The Village). There are certainly moments on Funstyle that rival the worst stuff off of the self-titled album, and I can understand the argument that failing at MIA-style sample-laden skit-noise-rap is in many ways worse than semi-succeeding at Avril Lavigne-style mall pop (however: I hate the song "Extraordinary" so, so much, as much as I hate some of the Weezer songs from Make Believe).
But the other songs on the record, if not top-tier Liz, aren't so far removed from her other work. The "normal" songs on Funstyle are mostly pitched somewhere between whitechocolatespaceegg and Somebody's Miracle in terms of melody, production, and lyrical content. Nothing is as bracing or catchy as "Polyester Bride" or "Jealousy" or "Never Said" or "What Makes You Happy" or, for that matter, as lovely as "Table for One," but she sings about new loves and looks at cracks in relationships, and some of it is quite affecting. As several writers have already pointed out, if Phair had put out a surprise EP consisting of "You Should Know Me," "Miss September," "Oh, Bangledash," "And He Slayed Her," and "Satisfied," it would generate a much more muted reaction, at least some of which would probably be: Liz is back, sort of!
Of course, not nearly as much has been written about those songs on the whole. This time around, criticism seems to be a self-selecting process: many of the bloggy reactions to Funstyle have actually been quite thoughtful and considered, far moreso than many of the reactions to Liz Phair and Somebody's Miracle (even in retrospect). I particular liked the Ann Powers blog post and a refreshingly non-outraged discussion on The Awl.
Of course, there are plenty of less nuanced opinions, too. Most of the WTF-snarking has come from people who listened to the stream of "Bollywood" and posted something immediately to be first, as if the album hadn't actually been released yet. A lot of major outlets still haven't bothered to review the record in full, presumably because music writers like getting their advance review copies, and why bother paying six bucks to download a messy, erratic Liz Phair album when you can stream the first single and just laugh at it? (And for the record: "Bollywood," with its silly raps and cartoony vocal effects, is a damn sight better than "U Hate It," which closes out the record.)
And Funstyle is messy and erratic, all the more so for, like Liz Phair, mingling some of her worst songs ever in with a bunch of more measured tunes with an eclecticism that borders on masochism. But for now, I've found the record compulsively listenable, as if I can listen to it enough to finally understand what Liz is thinking with some of these songs. Not her literal intent, which is painfully clear on the worst of the skit-like bedroom experiments, but why she thought these dopey songs belonged on a record with a half-batch of traditional Liz songs. I wonder if this is a singer-songwriter problem; Ben Folds has experienced similar problems in recent years, reconciling some wonderfully perceptive and well-written songs with clumsy satire.
My final reaction to this phase will have more to do with what Liz wants to do with Funstyle. If this is a one-off released for fun, Liz blowing off steam and collecting what she's been working on lately, well, it doesn't entirely work, but I don't mind paying six bucks for the decent stuff, especially when that money goes directly to her. But if this is all we hear from her for the next three to five years -- the website claims that tour dates are coming; how can she tour on this album, really?! -- then it's a bit more troubling. Not so much for the existence of jokey tracks, but for the scraped-together nature of mixing jokey tracks with what sound like fairly polished demos. I could write a whole other post speculating about what all of this belated music-industry-bashing is about, since last I heard she was signed to the indie ATO records, and I can't imagine she was getting a lot of pressure to tart it up from them -- yet the (I assume) sarcastic mock acceptance speech in "U Hate It" mentions Dave Matthews, one of the ATO founders (and whatever I think of Dave Matthews music, the dude seems to have pretty decent taste in other music, and regardless, I can't imagine he makes for a particularly malevolent label exec). Funstyle makes me worried not because Liz Phair is over, but because I'm afraid she may see this as her last resort -- the best she can do in a collapsing industry. At this point, I'm hoping her next record gets no attention, not to sabotage her career, but to remove her gifts from this weird, vicious cycle.